Our Kind of Traitor

question since, other than the twin boys, the spectators might have been attending a revivalist meeting. By lowering his play, he meant slowing it down a bit and taking the odd ball that was on its way to the tramlines, or returning a drive without looking too hard at where it had landed. But given that the gap between them – in age and skill and mobility, if Perry was honest – was by now obvious, his only concern was to make a game of it, leave Dima with his dignity, and enjoy a late breakfast with Gail on the Captain’s Deck: or so he believed until, as they were again changing ends, Dima locked a hand on his arm and addressed him in an angry growl:

‘You goddam pussied me, Professor.’

‘I did what?’

‘That long ball was out. You see it out, you play it in. You think I’m some kinda fat old bastard gonna drop dead you don’t be sweet to him?’

‘It was borderline.’

‘I play retail, Professor. I want something, I goddam take it. Nobody pussy me, hear me? Wanna play for a thousand bucks? Make the game interesting?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Five thousand?’

Perry laughed and shook his head.

‘You’re chicken, right? You chicken, so you don’t bet me.’

‘I suppose that must be it,’ Perry agreed, still feeling the imprint of Dima’s hand on his upper left arm.

* * *

‘Advantage Great Britain!’

The cry resonates over the court and dies. The twins break out in nervous laughter, waiting for the aftershock. Until now Dima has tolerated their occasional bursts of high spirits. No longer. Laying his racquet on the bench, he pads up the steps of the spectators’ stand and, reaching the two boys, presses a forefinger to the tip of each of their noses.

‘You want I take my belt and beat the shit outta you?’ he inquires in English, presumably for the benefit of Perry and Gail, for why else would he not address them in Russian?

To which one of the boys replies in better English than his father’s: ‘You’re not wearing a belt, Papa.’

That does it. Dima smacks the nearer son so hard across the face that he spins halfway round on the bench before his legs stop him. The first smack is followed by a second just as loud, delivered to the other son with the same hand, reminding Gail of walking with her socially ambitious elder brother when he’s out pheasant shooting with his rich friends, an activity she abhors, and the brother scores what he calls a left and a right, meaning one dead pheasant to each gun barrel.

‘What got me was that they didn’t even turn their heads away. They just sat there and took it,’ said Perry, the schoolteachers’ son.

But the strangest thing, Gail insisted, was how amicably the conversation was resumed:

‘You wanna tennis lesson with Mark after? Or you wanna go home get religion from your mother?’

‘Lesson, please, Papa,’ says one of the two boys.

‘Then don’t you make any more ra-ra, or you don’t get no Kobe beef tonight. You wanna eat Kobe beef tonight?’

‘Sure, Papa.’

‘You, Viktor?’

‘Sure, Papa.’

‘You wanna clap, you clap the Professor there, not your no-good bum father. Come here.’

A fervent bear-hug for each boy, and the match proceeds without further episode to its inevitable end.

* * *

In defeat, Dima’s bearing is embarrassingly fulsome. He’s not merely gracious, he’s moved to tears of admiration and gratitude. First he must press Perry into his great chest, which Perry swears is made of horn, for the three-times Russian embrace. The tears meanwhile are rolling down his cheeks, and consequently Perry’s neck.

‘You’re a goddam fair-play English, hear me, Professor? You’re a goddam English gentleman like in books. I love you, hear me? Gail, come over here.’ For Gail the embrace is even more reverent – and cautious, for which she is grateful. ‘You take care this stupid fuck, hear me? He can’t play tennis no good, but I swear to God he’s some kinda goddam gentleman. He’s the Professor of fair play, hear me?’ – repeating the mantra as if he has just invented it.

He swings away to bark irritably into a mobile that the baby-faced bodyguard is holding out to him.

* * *

The spectators file slowly out of the court. The little girls need hugs from Gail. Gail is happy to oblige. One of Dima’s sons drawls ‘cool play, man’ in American English as he stalks past Perry on his way to his lesson, his cheek still scarlet from the slap. The beautiful Natasha attaches herself to the procession, leatherbound tome in hand. Her thumb marks the place where her reading was disturbed. Bringing up the rear comes Tamara on Dima’s arm, her bishop-grade Orthodox cross glinting in the risen sunshine. In the aftermath of the game, Dima’s limp is more pronounced. As he walks, he leans back, chin thrust forward, shoulders squared to the enemy. The bodyguards shepherd the group down the winding stone path. Three black-windowed people carriers wait behind the hotel to take them home. Mark the pro is last to leave.

‘Great play, sir!’ – clapping Perry on the shoulder. ‘Fine court craft. A little ragged on the backhands there, if I may make so bold. Maybe we should do a little work on them?’

Side by side, Gail and Perry watch speechless as the cortege bumps its way along the potholed spine road and vanishes into the cedar trees that shelter the house called Three Chimneys from prying eyes.

* * *

Luke looks up from the notes he has been taking. As if to order, Yvonne does the same. Both are smiling. Gail is trying to avoid Luke’s eye, but Luke is staring straight at her so she can’t.

‘So, Gail,’ he says briskly. ‘Your turn again, if we may. Mark was a pest. All the same, he does seem to have been quite a mine of information. What extra nuggets can you offer us about the Dima household?’ – then gives a flick of both little hands at once, as if urging his horse on to greater things.

Gail glances at Perry, she is not sure what for. Perry does not return her glance.

‘He was just so snaky,’ she complains, using Mark, rather than Luke, as the object of her disfavour, and wrinkles up her face to show how the bad taste lingers.

* * *

Mark had barely sat beside her on the bottom bench, she began, before he started banging on about what an important millionaire his Russian friend Dima was. According to Mark, Three Chimneys was only one of his several properties. He’d got another in Madeira, another in Sochi on the Black Sea.

‘And a house outside Berne,’ she went on, ‘where his business is based. But he’s peripatetic. Part of the year he’s in Paris, part Rome, part Moscow, according to Mark’ – and watched as Yvonne made another note. ‘But home, as far as the kids are concerned, is Switzerland and school is some millionaire internat establishment in the mountains. ‘He talks about the company. Mark assumes he owns it. There’s a company registered in Cyprus. And banks. Several banks. Banking’s the big one. That was what brought him to the island in the first place. Antigua currently boasts four Russian banks, by Mark’s count, plus one Ukrainian. They’re just brass plates in shopping malls and a phone on some lawyer’s desk. Dima’s one of the brass plates. When he bought Three Chimneys, that was for cash too. Not suitcases of it but laundry baskets, somewhat ominously, lent to him by the hotel, according to Mark. And twenty-dollar bills, not fifties. Fifties are too dicey. He bought the house, and a run- down sugar mill, and the peninsula they stand on.’

‘Did Mark mention a figure?’ – Luke is back.

‘Six million US. And the tennis wasn’t pure pleasure either. Or not to begin with,’ she continued, surprised by how much she remembered of the awful Mark’s monologue. ‘Tennis in Russia is a major status symbol. If a Russian tells you he plays tennis, he’s telling you he’s stinking rich. Thanks to Mark’s brilliant tuition, Dima went back to Moscow and won a cup and everybody gasped. But Mark isn’t allowed to tell that story, because Dima prides himself on being self-made. It was only because Mark trusted me so completely that he felt able to make an exception. And if I’d like to pop round to his shop some time, he had a dandy little room upstairs where we could